After I got home from the saling last weekend, I picked up the book The Treasure Chest, and a couple of things fell out, presumably because the former owner, or just a former owner, had marked favorite poems. Or stuck them in the book and forgot them.
One was a twenty-five-year-old church order-of-service sheet from a local church.
And a Christmas card.
The Christmas card was addressed to a Mrs. Sharp; the address was not the location of the estate sale, so the estate sale might have been from Mrs. Sharp’s next of kin, which would mean the book was untouched for a generation. Or I am speculating too much.
It’s a pretty non-descript Christmas card:
Undated, so no telling when this Christmas card was intended. But the address on the back is not local:
I thought it might be England, but that’s not the pattern of their postal codes, so I did some Internet searching.
That’s Sundby, Mors (Morsø), in Denmark:
The card is not stamped (which is unfortunate, as it would have been a boon to the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League chapter at church which collects stamps to sell to collectors as a fundraiser, and a 1950s or 1970s Danish stamp might have been worth more than the Forever Stamps I’ve been dropping in the box).
But the fact that the card is not stamped might indicate that the card was hand-delivered when cousin Sissel visited or when Mrs. Sharp went to Denmark on holiday. Or that the card was included in a box with a tin of Danish cookies.
I don’t know why found bookmarks like this fill me with such wonder. I guess because it’s a tactile relic of another era for which I can feel anemoia, the nostalgia for a place and time you’ve never been.
I used to have a Found Bookmarks blog on Blogspot; I roled it into this one when I moved to self-hosting fifteen years ago because I thought I would get some longer-form pieces out of the things tucked into books I bought and started to read. But they turned out to be more infrequent than I thought; the Found Bookmarks category will be up to 6 posts when I publish this one. And I have a folder with the actual ephemera in it, the things I posted about, as though these personal relics from a collection of other unknown people was worth preserving. I guess I’ll be a little more ruthless with such items from now on (and perhaps with that folder when I find it) because I don’t need to confuse my heirs who might wonder “Did Dad go to a Royals game in 2003?” Or, more likely, will just flip through the contents of that manila folder and shred it (contents is singular, you know, so it is the right pronoun here).
I will leave the paraphernaliaphilia and ephemeraphilia to the professional.
